Wednesday, November 9, 2022

Withings

While trying to better track my health I have bought into a few Withings products. It started with the desire to get a smart scale that could integrate with Home Assistant. This desicion was made before they started having Bluetooth as a main way of integrating, so the Withings Body+ seemed like an ok compromise (settling for a cloud polling integration). 
While the weight tracking works exactly as expected once a developer account was created and port 443 was forwarded to 8123 to allow Withings to validate  the connect, I did have to manually add a sensor in configuration.yaml to convert the metric weights to pounds. 



After some success with this scale integration I found a good deal on their under bed sensor for sleep tracking.  This also worked great for sleep tracking but failed to push occupancy data to Home Assistant in a timely manner. To get that closer to real time data into my system I ended up having to setup make use of webhooks and use two of the five free automations in my if this then that account. 
This sensor proved very valuable as an added conditions to a few of my motion sensors as my puppy dog started triggering some of my lighting/morning routine automations were being triggered by him when he was allowed out of his crate overnight a few times. 

The only disappointing thing I have run into with Withings is the lack of smart watch data being imported. I don't know what I would do with my step count, but I am sure I could come up with some interesting notifications for motivation/reminders to get my steps in for the day.

Wednesday, November 2, 2022

Oral B

 The future is kind of stupid. Home Assistant just added support for my toothbrush to directly integrate with local pushing of data.  They made it so easy to integrate since they made Bluetooth a direct way of integrating things, all I had to do was click configure after turning on my toothbrush. 

While this might seem silly for a grown adult to track, I will be converting a time based notification that reminds me to brush after breakfast and before bed to only be sent if I have not brushed the appropriate number of times that day. I have also added a counter to track how many times the brush head has been used. Most of those functions are probably available in the corporate application, but now I can delete their app and have total local control over this health related data.


I could see people with little kids being able to automate a great deal of things to only be allowed for their kids if they have properly brushed their teeth for the day. 


Server Monitoring

I have a headless Linux server that I have previously written about for ripping media disks.  While I have had MQTT integrated into the bash...